Iraq's slide into endemic violence has been obscured by the outside world's preoccupation with the Syrian conflict. Yet Iraq is in almost as parlous a state as its neighbour. Indeed, in July so far, deaths in Iraq have exceeded those in Syria. Consult the Iraq Body Count for the death list on any given day, say this Saturday just past. The pitiful tally then was two people by gunfire and AED in Baghdad, one person by IED in Mosul, one farmer by IED in Baquba, one person stabbed in Ba'aj, and "one preacher by gunfire" in Karmeh.

Behind those acronyms, AED for adhesive explosive device, and IED for improvised explosive device, lies a technology of killing which barely existed 10 years ago when the Americans and their allies invaded. Saturday, however, was a very light day in Iraq. On Sunday, more than 60 people were killed in car bomb blasts, the majority Shi'ites, and there was a similar toll from Monday's bombs.

As usual, the victims were ordinary folk, people waiting at bus stops, labourers on their way to work, men lined up for job interviews, amateur footballers. The viciousness and utter lack of discrimination recalls the terrible years after 2006, years Iraq was supposed to have put behind it with the establishment of a democratic government, the amendment of the constitution, and the transfer of the responsibility for security from the Americans to Iraqi soldiers and police.

But the prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, has proved to be a disastrous leader, subverting the constitution to concentrate power in his own hands, to exclude the Sunni minority and potentially to threaten the so far peaceful Kurdish north. The resulting Sunni backlash, exploited by al-Qaeda, is the background to the latest violence. The situation has been made worse by recent breakouts from the Abu Ghraib and Taji prisons, which returned veteran extremists to the fray and which suggest that the government may be as incompetent as it is dictatorial. Security, after all, is supposed to be Maliki's forte.

True, conventional fighting on the scale seen in Syria, as opposed to war by bombing and assassination, is not likely in Iraq because the proportions in the two countries are different. In Iraq the government derives from the Shi'ite majority, and the rebels from the Sunni minority. In Syria, the Alawite minority, notionally Shi'ite, rules, or tries to, and the rebels are drawn from the Sunni majority. The military balance reflects this demography.

But both sides in both countries grasp that they could perhaps redress this balance by allying with their co-religionists on the other side of the border. The two conflicts thus already overlap, and might even one day merge, a nightmare possibility that could extend the agony of both peoples into the far future.